“We’re surrounded by systems, devices and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We built them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of motives, but they do some unexpected and provocative things.” – Bruce Sterling, An Essay on the New Aesthetic

Our environment is full of machines interpreting our every gesture. We have video games programmed to judge our dance moves, electronic storefront advertisements that infer our gender, and security cameras that algorithmically deduce our intentions. These automated eyes peer through lenses of code continually attempting to make sense of our world.

What would happen if we cracked open these vision machines to reveal the images ﬂowing through? How does their way of seeing inﬂuence our own self-perception? Their gaze is strange and unsettling, yet we recognize ourselves within it. We appear distorted, somehow alien and uncanny--as if we’ve stumbled into a funhouse hall of mirrors, confronted with reﬂections at once foreign and familiar, virtual and real. Lines and dots overlay our faces and ﬁgures, a new type of tribal mask depicting our body’s interface to computational logic. These digital depictions speak to our contemporary existence as half virtual/half analog beings, and have inspired a group of artist-technologists to explore their potential.

WIRED FRAMES brings together artists who engage with machine perception to explore the humanistic, expressive, and creative potential of this mode of representation. The artists have taken up the subject of portraiture, exploring a new vanguard of the age-old genre. Both the viewers and the machines are responding to these portraits, following instinctual tendencies to look for facial patterns, to ﬁnd the human within the ﬁeld of view.